Always deeply curious about plants and inspired by my agronomist mother who was bringing me to her field experiments since I was 5, I moved from rural Ilia in Peloponnesus to Thessaloniki to study Agriculture in 1998. After 5 years of studies, I obtained my first degree in Agriculture from the School of Agriculture of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. During my studies, I realized that I wanted to learn more about plant genetics so I embarked for my post-graduate studies at the same university, obtaining first a MSc (2007) and then a PhD degree (2013) in Plant Genetics and Breeding. My PhD work, under the supervision of prof Athanasios Tsaftaris, mainly involved the study of the molecular effect of plant grafting and rootstock-scion interactions on key fruit quality characters of the scion and more specifically on fruit shape in pepper. Deterioration of fruit quality in some rootstock-scion grafting combinations is often an important issue in crop production and the results of my work suggested that grafting in pepper may lead to some inherited genetic and epigenetic changes in the scions thus paving the way to a better understanding of the grafting molecular interactions (you can download a copy of my PhD thesis - in Greek - here).
My first postdoctoral employment was at the Institute of Applied Biosciences (INAB) of CERTH (Thessaloniki, Greece) where I collaborated with Dr Anagnostis Argiriou in a project that included the analysis and exploitation of transcriptomic data for breeding Greek elite tomato varieties. I also managed a project about the study and analysis of the transcriptome of a wild Solanum species as a source of valuable genetic information that could help against abiotic and biotic stresses. After one year of post-doctoral work in Greece, I was awarded a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship by the European Commission to move to the University of East Anglia (Norwich, UK) and work in the field of small RNAs with prof Tamas Dalmay. My fellowship was about an Arabidopsis mutant screening to identify genes essential to microRNA degradation (turnover).
Since December 2017, I am an independent researcher in Plant Breeding and Genomics, at the Institute of Plant Breeding and Genetic Resources, HAO (Thessaloniki, Greece).
All these years I have never stopped being curious about how plants manage to be such amazing organisms.
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